A resource for the PDX literary community. Produced by Old Pal.
LitPDX seeks to amplify marginalized voices, and welcomes all, their ideas, their events, and their words.
For details regarding specific events please contact the organizers or venues. If you are an organizer or venue and would like to reach out to us please feel free to contact us or submit an event using our submission form. We’d love to hear from you!
Notes & Motes: The Vlatkovich Trio Plus One Michael Vlatkovich - trombone Chris Lee - percussion Shao Way Wu - Bass Casey Bush - poet
Explore the artistry of Japanese tea from cultivation to cup in Stories of Japanese Tea (Princeton Architectural Press), a comprehensive illustrated guide to the tea industry from Zach Mangan, founder of Kettl, a New York City- and Fukuoka, Japan-based tea and teaware company. Stories of Japanese Tea includes Japanese growers, their craft of tea-making, and how the tradition of tea has had an influence on cuisine, art, and health. Mangan’s visual exploration of one of the world's most popular beverages tells the stories of tea and tea-making in Japan: how it is grown, harvested, and processed, as well as how it is prepared and enjoyed. Through interviews with tea growers, information on health benefits from Dr. Andrew Weil, and amazing recipes from Japanese chefs and…
A redistricting crisis is now upon us. Nick Seabrook’s surprising, compelling new book, One Person, One Vote (Pantheon) tells the history of how we got to this moment — from the Founding Fathers to today’s high-tech manipulation of election districts — and shows us as well how to protect our most sacred, hard-fought principle of one person, one vote. Here is THE book on gerrymandering for citizens, politicians, journalists, activists, and voters. Seabrook, an authority on constitutional and election law and an expert on gerrymandering, begins before our nation’s founding, with the rigging of American elections for partisan and political gain and the election meddling of George Burrington, the colonial governor of North Carolina, in retaliation against his critics. Seabrook writes of Patrick Henry, who…
Literature open mic hosted by some lovely folks from PSU. You wrote it, you read it.
John Carter hosts this very open mic. You’re welcome to share any of your talents from any field of art or other interest. Music and poetry, of course, but also comedy, magic, dance. You can give an art talk about a piece of visual art. You can read a chapter of your dissertation. Let’s share our creative endeavors so that we can all grow through shared inspiration. Starting in March, Wellspring will be on 2nd and 4th Sundays right after Community Art Day. Sign ups start at 6:00 or so.
Lars Horn’s Voice of the Fish (Graywolf), the latest Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize winner, is an interwoven essay collection that explores the trans experience through themes of water, fish, and mythology, set against the backdrop of travels in Russia and a debilitating back injury that left Horn temporarily unable to speak. In Horn’s adept hands, the collection takes shape as a unified book: short vignettes about fish, reliquaries, and antiquities serve as interludes between longer essays, knitting together a sinuous, wave-like form that flows across the book. Horn swims through a range of subjects, roving across marine history, theology, questions of the body and gender, sexuality, transmasculinity, and illness. From Horn’s upbringing with a mother who used them as a model in photos and art…
Annie Bloom's welcomes Pacific Northwest author Emiko Jean for an in-store reading from Tokyo Dreaming, her sequel to Tokyo Ever After. This in-store reading is first come, first served. Seating is limited. Please be mindful of any store health policies that might be in effect on the night of the reading. This event was reschedule from 5/31/22. Signed and personalized copies are available! You must mention that you would like a signed or personalized copy in your order comments at checkout. If you are requesting personalization, please indicate the name for personalization in the order comments as well. Thank you! About Tokyo Dreaming: Return to Tokyo for a royal wedding in Emiko Jean's Tokyo Dreaming, the sequel to the Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick and…
Sleepwalk (Henry Holt) is a high speed and darkly comic road trip through a near-future America with a big-hearted mercenary, from beloved and acclaimed novelist Dan Chaon. Sleepwalk’s hero, Will Bear, is a man with so many aliases that he simply thinks of himself as the Barely Blur. At 50 years old, he’s been living off the grid for over half his life. He’s never had a real job, never paid taxes, never been in a committed relationship. A good-natured henchman with a complicated and lonely past and a passion for LSD microdosing, he spends his time hopscotching across state lines in his beloved camper van, running sometimes shady often dangerous errands for a powerful and ruthless operation he’s never troubled himself to learn too…
Virtual Event with Ellen Bravo and Larry Miller and their book Standing Up. We welcome (virtually) Ellen Bravo and Larry Miller in conversation with moderator Margaret Butler, former director of Jobs with Justice and activist in the environmental justice movement. In Standing Up, Ellen Bravo and Larry Miller have taken inspiration from their five decades organizing for labor and social justice to craft a novel about the people who clean bloody hospital sheets, forge parts for sewer pipes, arrange flights, or process checks, all while caring for kids, holding relationships together, and wrestling with multiple forms of oppression. This book is about the people Imbolo Mbue calls “the deliberately unheard.” The ones we see every day but do not know their names, their joys or…